The present invention relates to network communications and, more specifically, to providing high speed Internet access to users in hotel environments.
Any business traveler who relies on network communications to maintain contact with clients and the home office appreciates the availability of fast and reliable data ports at remote locations such as airport lounges and hotel rooms. The hospitality industry has only recently begun to understand the necessity of providing such high speed data connections to business travelers. In fact, given the explosive growth of network technologies and the corresponding dependence of the business professional on such technologies, hotels which do not move to provide high speed connectivity in guest rooms comparable to the typical office environment will likely lose a substantial portion of their business to hotels which do.
Unfortunately, many hotel rooms are not currently wired to accommodate high speed data traffic. That is, prior to 1990, virtually all hotel rooms were wired to provide only basic telephone service. As late as 1995, less than 10% of hotel rooms were wired to handle standard Ethernet data speeds. Even today, while the major players in the hospitality industry are searching for high speed connectivity solutions, the vast majority of hotel guest and conference rooms are still wired with low quality, single pair connections. One obvious solution would be to completely rewire all of the guest and conference rooms in each hotel facility to provide the desired data transmission capabilities. However, given the prohibitive cost of such an undertaking, a less costly solution would be desirable.
Even if such a costly rewiring were undertaken, there are other problems which are not addressed by an infrastructure upgrade. For example, even if a high speed connection to the hotel""s host is provided, it will often be the case that a guest""s laptop computer would be incompatible with the hotel network in some way. Thus, each guest""s laptop must be configured appropriately in order to communicate with the network and with the Internet beyond. This would likely involve loading special software onto a guest""s laptop each time the guest wants to go online. Not only would such a process be cumbersome and annoying to the hotel guest, it may also be unacceptable from the guest""s point of view in that reconfiguring the laptop may interfere with the current configuration in undesirable ways.
Neither does a costly wiring upgrade address the administrative and security issues related to providing Internet access via a hotel host. That is, high speed Internet access for hotel guests requires a network at the hotel property and some sort of connection between the hotel network and the Internet, e.g., a T1 or T3 line. A firewall at each hotel property would also be required to protect the internal network from unauthorized access. The existence of the firewall at each property, in turn, requires that most of the control and administration of the local network be performed at the hotel property rather than remotely, thus representing an undesirable redundancy of administrative functions.
Another administrative difficulty related to maintaining each hotel property as a separate Internet host involves the management of IP addresses. Ranges of globally unique 32-bit IP addresses are issued to organizations by a central Internet authority. These addresses are organized in a four octet format. Class A IP addresses are issued to very large organizations and employ the first of the four octets to identify the organization""s network and the other three to identify individual hosts on that network. Thus, a class A address pool contains nearly 17 million (224) globally unique IP addresses. With class B addresses, the first two octets are used to identify the network and the last two to identify the individual hosts resulting in 64,000 (216) globally unique IP addresses for each organization. Finally, with class C addresses, the first three octets are used to identify the network and the last octet to identify the individual hosts resulting in only 256 (28) globally unique IP addresses for each organization.
Unfortunately for many medium to large size organizations (1,000 to 10,000 hosts), it has become very difficult, if not impossible, to obtain anything other than a class C address for their networks due to the fact that the class A and B address spaces have been almost entirely locked up. This problem has been addressed to some extent by the use of a Network Address Translation (NAT) protocol. According to such a protocol, when a local host on an organization""s network requests access to the Internet, it is assigned a temporary IP address from the pool of globally unique IP addresses available to the organization. The local host is identified by the globally unique address only when sending or receiving packets on the Internet. As soon as the local host disconnects from the Internet, the address is returned to the pool for use by any of the other hosts on the network. For additional details on the implementation of such a protocol please refer to K. Evegang and P. Francis, The IP Network Address Translator (NAT), Request for Comments xe2x80x9cRFCxe2x80x9d 1631, Cray Communications, NTT, May 1994, the entirety of which is incorporated herein by reference for all purposes.
Such dynamic assignment of IP addresses might be sufficient for certain organizations as long as the number of simultaneous users which require access to the Internet remains below the maximum of 256. However, if, for example, a 1200 room hotel were hosting an Internet technologies seminar it would be extremely likely that the demand for Internet access would exceed the available address pool. All of this also assumes that a major hotel chain would be able to obtain a complete class C pool of addresses for each of its properties; not necessarily a reasonable assumption.
It is therefore desirable to provide methods and apparatus by which each of the properties in a major hotel chain may provide high speed Internet access to each of its guest rooms in a secure, inexpensive, and reliable manner without undue administrative burdens on the individual properties.
According to the present invention, methods and apparatus are provided which make use of existing hotel wiring infrastructures to provide secure, high speed data and Internet access to each of the guest rooms in a hotel property. Specific implementations of the technology described herein have the ability to auto-baud down to whatever speed the wiring infrastructure will allow thus providing the maximum bandwidth allowable by that infrastructure. According to specific embodiments, the present invention is able to select the maximum baud rate appropriate for each individual guest room. According to other specific embodiments, where the wiring to the guest rooms is a single pair phone line, the present invention allows 1 Megabit half duplex data transmissions to coexist on the single pair with standard telephone signals.
According to one embodiment of the invention, each guest room in the hotel is interconnected via the hotel""s current wiring infrastructure into a local network. When a guest wishes to access the Internet, he connects his laptop to an in-room module installed in each guest room which temporarily assigns a xe2x80x9cfakexe2x80x9d local IP address to the guest""s laptop. The xe2x80x9cfakexe2x80x9d local IP address is associated with the in-room module and is unique on the hotel""s local network. The address is xe2x80x9cfakexe2x80x9d in that it is not a valid Internet address and in that it replaces the laptop""s own real IP address. The assigned local IP address uniquely identifies the guest""s laptop on the hotel network while that laptop remains connected to the in-room module.
A headend module in the hotel handles packet routing and provides access to the Internet. In facilitating access to the Internet, the headend module temporarily assigns globally unique IP addresses from a pool of, for example, class C addresses to in-room modules in individual guest rooms in response to requests for Internet access from those rooms. An assigned IP address remains dedicated to a particular in-room module (and thus the associated guest""s computer) for the duration of the Internet transaction. Upon termination of the transaction, the globally unique IP address is disassociated from the in-room module and put back into the pool for use in facilitating a later Internet transaction from any of the hotel""s rooms.
According to another embodiment of the invention, the local networks of a number of hotels are interconnected via a remote server thereby forming a private wide area network, or a virtual private network. The operation of the virtual private network to provide high speed data and Internet access to individual guest rooms is similar to the process described above except that the xe2x80x9cfakexe2x80x9d IP address of the in-room modules are unique over the entire virtual private network, and the temporary assignment of globally unique IP addresses is performed by the remote server rather than the hotel headend. This is advantageous in that it is contemplated that the remote server has a larger pool of such addresses associated therewith than an individual hotel network might be able to procure (e.g., a class B address pool).
Thus, because the IP address needs of all of the hotels in the virtual private network are spread out over the entire installed base of the remote server, bursts of need at any one property which exceed the capacity of a single class C address pool may be accommodated. The virtual private network embodiment of the present invention also has the advantage that firewall security and other network administrative functions may be centralized and performed remotely without compromising the security of any individual hotel network.
Thus, according to the present invention, methods and apparatus are provided for providing access to a network via a first one of a plurality of network access nodes in the network. The network access nodes each have a network address associated therewith which is unique on the network, the first network access node having a first network address associated therewith. The first network address is associated with a first computer while the first computer is connected to the first network access node thereby providing access to the network.
According to a more specific embodiment, Internet access is provided to a first computer via a first one of a plurality of network access nodes in a network using a plurality of globally unique IP addresses. The network access nodes each have a network address associated therewith which is unique on the network, the first network access node having a first network address associated therewith. The first network address is associated with the first computer while the first computer is connected to the first network access node thereby providing access to the network. A first one of the globally unique IP addresses is associated with the first network address for conducting an Internet transaction. The first globally unique IP address is disassociated from the first network address upon termination of the Internet transaction. The first globally unique IP address is then available for association with any of the network addresses. According to one embodiment, the network comprises a local area network and the associating and disassociating of the globally unique IP address is done by a headend associated with the local area network. According to another embodiment, the network comprises a wide area network and the associating and disassociating of the globally unique IP address is done by a remote server which controls the wide area network.
According to a specific embodiment, a network is provided having a plurality of network access nodes each having a network address associated therewith which is unique on the network. Each network access node is for providing access to the network for a computer connected to the network access node. A headend module interconnects the network access nodes. The network address associated with each network access node is associated with the computer connected thereto thereby providing access to the network.
According to another specific embodiment, a wide area network is provided having a plurality of networks each comprising a plurality of network access nodes. Each network access node has a network address associated therewith which is unique among the plurality of networks. Each network access node provides access to the wide area network for a computer connected to the network access node. A remote server interconnects the plurality of networks into the wide area network. The network address associated with each network access node is associated with the computer connected thereto thereby providing access to the wide area network.
According to yet another specific embodiment, a network access node is provided for providing access to a network of which the network access node is a part. The network access node has a network address associated therewith which is unique on the network. According to a more specific embodiment, the network address node is operable to associate the network address with a computer while the computer is connected to the network access node thereby providing access to the network.
According to a further specific embodiment, a headend module is provided for interconnecting a plurality of network access nodes in a network. Each network access node has a network address associated therewith which is unique on the network and provides access to the network for a computer connected to the network access node. According to a more specific embodiment, the headend module associates the network address associated with each network access node with the computer connected thereto thereby providing access to the network.
According to another specific embodiment, methods and apparatus are provided for providing conference services over a network having a plurality of users associated therewith. A group identification tag is associated with selected ones of the plurality of users thereby identifying the selected users as attendees of the conference. The conference services are provided on the network. Access to the conference services is then restricted to the selected users using the group identification tag.